Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Educationalist whose TED talk 'Do Schools Kill Creativity' has been viewed millions of times and advocates for creativity in education.
On the island
Eight records
I can remember at the age of thirteen me and everybody else being electrified when we heard this music and it woke us all up.
I got involved in dance in some formal ways through a wonderful man who used to run the Gulbenkian Foundation called Peter Brinson, and this piece of music kind of conjures all that world up for me, and there's something very haunting, I think, about the opening melody of this.
My mum and dad met in the thirties... they were both big fans of Hollywood musicals... the Lullaby of Broadway had become a signature theme of the evening... I should always remember these vast gatherings of people hoofing along to the Lullaby of Broadway.
I made my debut at the Albert Hall singing in Handel's Messiah. But before anybody gets carried away, it was for a group called the Portsmouth Sinfonia, where a group of art students decided they wanted to study music... they couldn't actually play the instruments... it was dreadful, but very, very funny.
It coincided with me meeting Terry, who's been my wife and partner ever since. You know, we've been together now for 37 years.
We now live in California... this song captures some of that spirit for us.
End of the LineFavourite
Terry has gone without a lot of things that I know most people would like to have had. But there's a lovely line in about Travelling Wilburys about what comes next and maybe a diamond ring. Well I finally got her a diamond ring and I played the record when she got it.
I couldn't listen to it for years. He says, I went down to the place where I knew she lay sleeping... So it's about his mother... I remember when I first heard this having a real trepidation, because I thought, some day my mother won't be there... I turned right and I did this sort of two hundred mile detour to have dinner with her, and I'm just so glad I did. And of course now she's not there, and so I couldn't play this record for a long time. But now I can.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:26Why do you think it's so important to be original?
Well, creativity to me is what sets us apart on the earth as a species that creates music and art and literature and design and technology and ... it's this power of imagination that really is the wellspring of everything that makes us human.
Presenter asks
2:39What was the essential message of your TED talk entitled 'Do Schools Kill Creativity'?
It was that our current systems of education tend to stifle these powers of creativity. Not in a way that's deliberate, but it tends to be systematic. ... we're all born with tremendous confidence in our creative capacities ... but by the time kids leave school, they often have lost that confidence.
Presenter asks
5:17How on earth do people escape education's death valley when it comes to the actual nuts and bolts of things?
We didn't have these systems of mass public education until the late nineteenth century. They're quite new things, and they were developed largely to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution. They have certain features of industrialism in them. They are like factories still. ... what I'm arguing for really is a more humane and personalized form of education.
The keepsakes
The luxury
thought I'd take a quad bike with a solar panel so it doesn't let me down
Presenter asks
5:58How much personalization is actually possible in a class with thirty or thirty-three children?
Well, you know, great teachers always did it. ... teaching is an art form. It's not a delivery system. It's about getting to know your students ... and great teachers always did that. So it's not an impossible thing to do at all, but you do need good conditions for it to happen.
Presenter asks
6:39Can you give specifics about what sort of things should be done, ought to be done, must be done, that are not being done?
We need a broad curriculum. ... there's an increasing emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But they're not enough. For a broad education you need the arts, you need the humanities, you need physical education. ... If you sit kids down, day after day, doing passive activities, don't be surprised if they fidget. ... So you need education systems which not only help students to understand the world around them, they need to understand the world inside them, and above all, you want systems of assessment which are motivating and positive.
Presenter asks
22:14How did you meet your wife Terry?
I was running a course for teachers in Liverpool on drama in schools. It was nineteen seventy seven, and it happened that that week we were booked into Liverpool, and my dad, who had been ill for a while, had been taken into hospital. And it turned out to be the week he died... Anyway, I showed up the next morning ... I was pacing up and down having a cigarette. And the door opened, and this woman came out. I said to Paul, 'Who's that?' ... 'Is that Terry Watts?' ... So, Terry was the reason the course happened, actually, altogether. We just kept in touch.
“Creativity to me is what sets us apart on the earth as a species that creates music and art and literature and design and technology and I mean other animals may well have imaginations, but they don't pick their desert island discs, you know, they don't listen to radiohead. And for me it's this power of imagination that really is the wellspring of everything that makes us human.”
“Young children are tremendously imaginative and buoyant, but by the time kids leave school, they often have lost that confidence.”
“Teaching is an art form. It's not a delivery system.”
“If you sit kids down, day after day, doing passive activities, don't be surprised if they fidget.”
“Real happiness comes from finding things that fulfil you and that you feel that you are meant to be doing.”
“I would find it hard to be away from people.”